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The riding was good today. The four of us set out bright and not too early and the sun finally made an appearance for us. Kazuko decided rather than go down the main highway that Mr Kon and I took yesterday for the brevet, we would go a bit further inland and take what turned out to be a much more scenic route. Nice work Kazuko.

I’m mainly going to run with photos for today’s entry but, briefly, we rode together-ish (Mr Kon and Kazuko taking a strong lead, me a bit behind them and Damian a bit further back behind me) until lunch, which we stopped for at the Ikeda Wine Castle.

Ikeda Wine Castle

For 860 yen (about A$10) wegot the feast pictured below:

and that included buffet rice, miso soup and drinks. I had two cups of coffee.

Over lunch, Damian and I came to grips with the technology on our phones and found that not only can we put a map of the day’s route on his phone, we found a use for Google Latitude. As long as we both stop and check our phones every so often, we can watch each other’s progress toward the day’s destination. This makes it much easier for us ride at our own pace without worrying about where the other person is. In fact, at the end of the day, I was able to calculate roughly when Damian would arrive and wait out the front of the rider house for him.

So after lunch we all carried on at our own pace, which meant I sometimes lost sight of Mr Kon and Kazuko but they were kind enough to wait at a konbini for me to catch up. Eventually we arrived at our home for the night, a rider house named Mikki (or maybe Mickey) House in what seemed like wilderness. If not for the trucks on the main road in front of us and the bells every time a train went by, the silence would have been daunting. Here are the photos of the day’s ride: